A USB printer has one job: accept data from the machine it is plugged into. A network printer accepts jobs from anything on the same network, which is convenient but adds addressing, discovery and firewall behaviour to the list of things that can fail.
Most 'printer offline' complaints are network problems. The printer changed address after a router restart, or it dropped to a different Wi-Fi band, and the saved queue still points at the old location.
A common mess is having both: the same printer installed once over USB and again over the network, so half the jobs land in a queue nobody is watching.
For a single desk, USB is simpler and faster to troubleshoot. For shared use, network printing with a reserved address is worth the setup.